


Stock, Steel and Starlight

by marythefan (marylex)



Category: lotrips
Genre: AU, M/M, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-06-06
Updated: 2004-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-12 13:24:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/812058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marylex/pseuds/marythefan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, Five Things That Never Happened To Orlando Bloom (Fantasy Mix)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_i. unto zeor, forever_

It's so wrong, and Orlando doesn't know if he can stop himself. His need is too strong.

"You know we can do this," Sean says, standing across the sparsely furnished room of the small cabin, arms folded, radiating calm and peace and so much promise. "I can do this for you." 

He holds out one hand, soft green gaze meeting Orlando's eyes steadily, his field flaring like a beacon, lush and sweet and golden, reaching out to lap Orlando in warmth and welcome, to pull him in and ...

And Orlando wrenches himself back down to normal awareness, away from the temptation of Sean's selyn-drenched nager. 

"Stop trying to manipulate me," he snaps, irritation flaring as Sean's high field continues to tug at him. He hugs himself, feeling the ache in his forearms where nerve-rich sheaths are contracting, where extended tentacles are already moist and leaking, ready to wrap around tender flesh and draw out the life-giving energy that Sean's body produces, that his own body needs, that's calling to him. 

Sean begins to speak, stops himself, and Orlando wants to slap him.

_I'm in need, I'm not a child,_ he thinks resentfully. Some buried part of his brain recognizes that the itch under his skin, the instinct driving him is affecting his judgment, but he doesn't care. Sean - silly, stupid, self-confident - doesn't seem to understand how dangerous Orlando can be.

"Come on," Sean says. "You can do this. We can do this. We planned for this."

"This isn't meant for me." He's shivering. This is so wrong. What they've talked about doing is blasphemous, perverted. Even if it wasn't, it can't possibly work. Orlando isn't one of those special Simes he's heard about, the channels who can control the strength of their draw when they take selyn, or just stop if they're going too fast. The image of Sean dead in his grasp ghosts through his mind, and he doesn't know what he was thinking. He shouldn't be here, shouldn't have set himself and Sean up for this. He needs to leave now, get out, into the city where he can reach a Government Pen before it's too late.

"You're too far away, you wouldn't get there in time," Sean says, anticipating him. "And even if you could, do you want to kill again?"

No. He can't kill again. They haunt his dreams - the slack faces, the limp bodies falling from his hands, the empty husks drained of selyn. He can't kill, not since he met Sean. Sean's lived out-Territory and free - Wild, the Government would label him - and he's nothing like the Gens that Orlando has always known, nothing like Orlando's monthly requisition from the Pens, cattle bred for the kill, blank and labile creatures that stay emotionless until their resistance triggers the pain that triggers the fear that sends him spiraling into killbliss. Sean's nothing like the others, but Orlando dreams of them now, of what might lie under the drugs that keep them mute and malleable until they're led to the killing room. 

Sean runs a hand through his shaggy ginger hair, mussing it, and it falls back over his face and into his eyes. He knows as well as Orlando that there's not much time. Too much longer and Orlando's selyn reserves will be exhausted, driving him from simple need down into attrition and death. Sean's concern and frustration aren't quite fear, but they're close enough, and Orlando rocks forward on the balls of his feet, reacting to the heightened emotional fields and zeroing in on his prey. He finds himself stalking Sean in a slow circle around the room.

"Stop it," he grits out through clenched teeth and watches Sean take a deep breath, feels the lockdown and the perceptible shift in the other man's emotions. 

Fear for Orlando is still fear, and that will prove just as deadly as fear _of_ Orlando. It's the fear that kills, the fear and the accompanying resistance that burns out Gen physiology as selyn is stripped away. A Gen that doesn't ... _who_ doesn't fear won't die. Sean told him that. He has to believe that.

"Orlando, I've done this before," Sean says, and Orlando feels rage flare at the thought of someone else touching Sean, touching his Sean, another Sime interfering with his Gen, his kill. Sean nods slowly and, "Well, come on then," he says with impatience.

The flick of Sean's nager is deliberate, a curling tendril of emotion - desire, defiance - thrown out on a sudden blaze of the energy field like a slap, goading Orlando into action. Augmenting will only drive him deeper into need, but he's got Sean up against the plain wooden wall of the cabin before either of them can think. Sean's broader than Orlando, more heavily muscled, but it's nothing to the wiry Sime strength that's Orlando's birthright.

"I can kill you," Orlando says, harsh, trembling with the effort of controlling himself.

"You can't do anything to me that I don't let you do," Sean says, and Orlando shifts, reaches, intending to touch the starred cross Sean wears around his neck, but Sean says, "Come on, then," softer this time, almost a whisper, stretching out his own hand, and Orlando's gone. His tentacles lash out, whipping around Sean's bare forearms.

"That's right ..." Sean starts, but he's cut off as Orlando yanks him in, pressing their mouths together to seal the final contact point.

There's a trickle of selyn between his lips, tickling, painfully slow, and Orlando _pulls_ , lightning-fast reflex, helpless to control himself, and Sean opens to him.

 

_ii. a boy and his horse_

They're four days in from the border on the South Trade Road, past Horn, when Orlando feels Evisel stumble on a patch of ice, a moment of free-fall and an emptiness in his stomach like when he misses a stairstep, and he snaps awake in the saddle. He has to convince her to stop - they've been pushing hard and making bad time anyway, cold air cutting into their lungs and snow slowing the typical speed that got them assigned to special messenger duty in the first place. He's not sure how much of the dull weariness he feels is hers and how much is his own as she slows to a walk, still plodding inexorably forward until he spots a Waystation and slides off her back into cold and wet up to his knees, stumbling himself at the feel of solid, unmoving ground beneath his boots.

He finds grain inside, and the makings of porridge, so he starts a fire and puts together something hot. He sees to Evisel's needs - some of which include merely standing quietly as she presses her head against his chest, white on Whites, her hide and his leathers blending into the snowdrift background. They send mutual wordless comfort and encouragement back and forth as they steel themselves for the afternoon's push, but he daren't take off her tack or saddle. He doesn't know what shape he's going to be in when he finishes what he has to do - certainly not in any shape to ride the rest of the way to the Capitol bareback if he can't get her gear back on her.

They can't stop long - there's still plenty of light left in this day, and the message he carries is too urgent. He can feel Evisel's impatience nudging at him as he shovels down porridge - can feel her as clearly as if she were shoving him along with a well-placed push of her nose. If he could Mindspeak, he'd be trying to contact someone at the Capitol already, but he can't, not even enough to talk to Evisel in words. There's something he can try, though, and he's already made preparations, a carefully coded message rolled and tucked away inside the hollow shaft of a single, black-banded arrow, fletching broken in the unique pattern that's his signature. He hopes he's not too far away for this to work, but if he can get a message to the King now, it'll mean at least three more days time to get troops on the road for the Karsite border - three days he and Evisel will take making it the rest of the way in. He remembers the good-natured teasing when his Fetching Gift turned out to be more of an anti-Fetching Gift, but it's going to come in handy.

He does it outside, brushing snow from the flagstones in front of the Waystation to kneel in the clear air and closing his eyes to focus. He needs somewhere familiar, somewhere he knows like the back of his hand, and someone who will recognize the message and appreciate the need for both secrecy and urgency. He forms the picture in his mind - a Palace room, spare, like an echo of the barracks rooms Sean would have lived in before he'd become part of the King's personal guard but with a more homelike feel than Orlando's rarely-inhabited rooms. It's simply furnished with a couple of chairs, a low wooden table with cushions to sit on for eating, but it's warm from the fireplace and the rich, deep burgundies and golds that make up the tapestry on the wall and the blanket that stays tossed over the back of a chair unless Orlando's wrapped himself in it when he visits after a chilly night on foaling watch, stealing part of Sean's breakfast as the Guard captain prepares for the day. Orlando tastes mulled wine, and an undertone of apples that must be from Evisel. Sean always treats her more like a mere horse than he should, and she accepts it with amused forbearance, crunching the small pippins he offers her when he visits them out in the field beside the Palace.

He pictures all this, focusing on the low table that should be empty of cups and plates before the noon meal, then wraps his mind around the arrow he holds in his hands and _pushes_ , feeling the metal shaft writhe in his grasp. He senses Evisel in the back of his mind, shoring him up, and he gives one last mental shove, concentrating everything he's got. There's a sudden - almost ludicrous - popping sound as air rushes into the empty space where the arrow was.

He thinks for a moment that he's going to pass out from the pain in his head, but he doesn't. He retches instead, losing the porridge, bent over in the snow, movement that drives an invisible shard of glass through his temple, behind his eyes, to grind against the _other_ invisible shard that's being rammed straight-on into his forehead. He hasn't ever over-extended himself like this, not even when he was first learning to use his Gift. He's almost glad he doesn't have FarSight - he'd only feel obligated to try checking whether the arrow reached its destination.

"Ow," he says out loud, piteously. It doesn't seem adequate, but there's no one around to offer sympathy anyway, no one but Evisel, who doesn't need words either to know he wants sympathy or to offer it. He can feel her warm breath against the back of his neck as she whuffles into his hair and the concern coming off her in waves. He sends back reassurance tinged with regretful amusement at his state. She snorts but stands stoically as he uses her to pull himself up, pausing for a minute to lean with his cheek pressed against her warm shoulder before he hauls himself into the saddle. When he opens his eyes, he realizes he's seeing double.

"Ow," he says again, and closes them as she picks up speed, thankful for the smoothness of a Companion's gait.

He tells himself he only has to stay on for three more days.

 

_iii. newborn world_

Sean pulls clothing from a public locker before they enter West Texas, holding part of the bundle out to Orlando.

"You're not going to be able to go in wearing that," he says, and Orlando looks down at her dress - a light frothy number chosen because she likes the way it flows around her knees - in confusion before thinking _Oh. Anachronism._

They're strict about maintaining realism in Disneylands. It would be different if she was going in as a tourist, on a less-personal guided tour, but that doesn't seem to be the plan. The clothes Sean hands her are a simple woven shirt and work trousers with braces - functional period pieces, a man's clothing like the set that replaces Sean's short sarong.

"I wasn't expecting ..." he says, a wave of his hand taking in Orlando's new look.

Orlando's only been female once before, several years ago, before she ever met Sean. She'd been too influenced by fads and trends to focus on what details she really wanted then, but this time, she paid as much attention to the specs for her own body as she pays to those she's trying to capture in clay and stone in her studio. The nanobots that reshaped cartilage and DNA have left her face more refined, but her breasts are smaller than are popular this season, and she resisted the designer's urging to splurge on a couple of extra inches of height. It felt right. 

It also turns out to have been a good idea, because the trousers are still long enough. She balks at putting on shoes, though, until Sean says "Rocks." She's not a big fan of shoes, and it's not as if she usually needs them in the corridors.

Orlando wouldn't have pegged Sean as a Disneyland dweller, but then, Orlando's only ever seen him when he comes to the studio to model. It's surprise enough that he extended the offer for her to visit - her generation has had the need for privacy and personal space all but bred out of them in the crowded housing levels and jammed public walkways of Luna, but Sean's old enough to remember more elbow room, to feel the press on all sides and to be selective about who he invites into the sanctuary of his home. Surprise on top of that, then, when they arrived at West Texas. 

She wonders if he's a Heinleiner, or maybe one of the many people with the common Lunarian phobia of airlessness, who avoid even the sight of the surface outside the fields of the upper levels. More importantly - for the moment, at least - she wonders if she's going to be able to get into his pants, or get him into hers, or if this means the trip out here was really for the wonders of bioengineered nature that's been cultured in a dome blasted into rock and designed to provide an authentic 1800s Old Earth experience.

_Very authentic,_ she thinks, as she sifts powdery dirt through expert hands, squinting in the light of the artificial fusion sun. It's full West Texas noon, and it's hot. She can feel the sweat sheening her skin, and she blinks against the dust in the air, holding up both hands to shield her eyes as she tilts her face to the blue-painted sky, feeling a breeze caress her cheek and ruffle her hair. Sean holds out a hand and she rubs her palms against her trousers before she lets him pull her up from the ground where she's paused to examine the habitat. She shivers slightly at the feel of his calloused fingers tightening around hers.

He examines her as she dusts herself off, pushing up her sleeves before shoving her hands in the trouser pockets. She thinks he might examine her a little bit longer than necessary, and he takes her elbow as he directs her to his cabin, pointing out the direction of New Austin to the west and a cloud of dust in the south where a film crew is getting shots for the latest Western.

He built the cabin himself, he tells her, and she believes it, remembering the roughness of his hands on her skin. It's small and neat with a front porch shaded by a pair of trees, and she puts her arms around his neck and kisses him there.

"Um," she says, when he pulls back and looks at her. She wonders if she should apologize. "That was probably unexpected. It's just ... you know. Change mania." She shrugs her shoulders and tries to look casual.

"Hormone shock," Sean says, and he's smiling again. "I remember those first few days." 

"I didn't realize you'd ever ..." Orlando's faintly surprised because ... well, she's not really sure why. A lot of people Change these days, switching sexes like buying a new wardrobe. But Sean's always seemed so male-identified.

"Long enough to carry my second daughter," Sean says. His hands have fallen to her hips, and she can feel the heat and the weight of them through the rough fabric of her clothing. "I think you'd like Molly - she works with weather, designs sunsets and icestorms, that sort of thing, over in the Pennsylvania Disneyland."

"Molly?" Orlando says, arching a brow. "And Sean. Kind of old-fashioned names."

"Maybe, so, Orlando," he says, putting a slight emphasis on her own name, and she laughs. "Suits you, though - pretty boy, Changed into a girl, dressed up like a boy." His voice is a soft rumble, and Orlando's having a hard time catching her breath.

"It's not just the hormones," she says. "I mean, the complete lack of finesse is, but I wanted to, already, anyway, and I thought maybe when you invited me out here that you might be planning ... I mean ... I know you thought you were going to be bringing home a guy, so I don't even know if you're interested in heterosex. Or, maybe, not into women, no matter what sex you are ..."

"Orlando," he says, cupping her cheek. "Be quiet now."

He kisses her, sliding his fingers back into her curls to cushion her head as he pushes her up against the outside wall of the house, and she can feel him hard inside his trousers against her hip, and she moans into his mouth as he pushes a thigh between her legs. She wants to rub against him, all over him, and her hands are at the buttons of his shirt before he pulls away and catches her wrists.

"No," he says. "No. I want to watch you."

He pushes her hands against the wall, above her head, and the shirt rubs rough against her nipples, and his other hand is pressed against the front of her trousers and she's pinned there and it'd be enough pressure, just enough pressure, if she was still male but she's not and she rocks her hips into his palm trying to get his hand at the right angle before she feels him fumbling with the fastenings and hears him curse under his breath and then he gets the trousers undone and gets his hand down there, sliding rough and hot against her, and then those fingers are pushing inside her, sliding into slick wetness, and the heel of his hand is pressing just ... right ... there ... her hips flexing into him, pushing onto him, up and up in the dusty heat and she can feel his gaze like a feather fingertip touch on her lips and her cheeks and her eyelids as she comes.

 

_iv. fire beneath my wings_

The wall ringing Swalekeep is only partially finished, and Orlando stands with Liv at a gap in the stones, looking out toward rich green meadowlands destined to become - once again - the battlefield of powerful neighboring princedoms. Refugees have been pouring into the city, fleeing the armies of Princemarch and the Desert - hapless farmers and minor _athr'im_ powerless to protect their lands from those determined to use them as private playgrounds of war.

_And what do those princes care?_ he thinks bitterly. _The crops they trample and burn aren't tithes destined for their own coffers or even supplies to be laid by to fill their own people's bellies through the winter._

Liv lays a hand on his arm as she senses his agitation.

"If you want to help them, we have to find out where the armies lie and what direction they're moving - and we must do it quickly," she says, turning her face to the westering sun low on the horizon. He huffs out a breath and nods, despite his anger at being able to do nothing more than move people out of the way faster, and she pauses to look at him. "Princemarch and the Desert have been marching across these lands for years, and they'll continue for years, but it won't always be this way."

He studies her in the ruddy glow of sunset, wondering if she's mouthing platitudes or if the Goddess has shown her something in the Fire that lets her be sure. 

_When?_ he wants to ask her. _How long will this go on?_

She lifts both hands, and the rings that mark her as a Sunrunner flash silver and gold, seven of them, two more than Orlando has earned so far. He reaches out with his mind and touches her colors on the sunlight, diamond and sapphire and pearl, the unique combination that makes her Liv, and together they plait ribbons of light, weaving them into a pathway that carries them toward the armies in the east. Colors shift around him, flow over and through him as they ride, and he's caught up, exhilarated and free for a moment, but he flies over scarred earth and wrecked fields that have already felt the booted weight of soldiers' feet and the sharp, digging hooves of warhorses.

_Hurry,_ Liv says, and he hears her urgency. They don't have much time before the sun disappears and they lose the light that ties them to their bodies, and he shivers at the thought of being shadow-lost, forever trapped in the darkness and unable to return to his body. 

There have been rumors of a sudden influx of troops in the Vere Hills, moving in from the sands of the Desert on the other side of the rolling land, armies massing, and he knows the Princemarch forces will try to draw them out. He counts quickly, estimating the strength of each body, trying to gauge the paths they'll take to the inevitable clash.

_We have to warn Sean,_ he tells Liv, and he feels her assent - the people Sean protects will have to be moved soon if they want to escape the worst of the blows that will come down on them from east and west.

_Tonight,_ Liv says. _After moonrise, I'll tell him. We have to go back now. The sun is setting._

_It won't take any time at all,_ he protests, turning his thoughts toward the fields and settlements where he knows Sean will be organizing and cajoling stragglers reluctant to leave.

_Orlando,_ she says. _The armies won't move again before the morning. There will be plenty of time. We must go back to Swalekeep._

He knows she's right - there's no way the forces will meet or even move yet in the dark, and the few hours before moonrise will make barely any difference when Sean already is working on evacuating his people. Liv's sixth ring - one that Orlando still has to earn - is symbol of her ability to weave moonlight as well as sunlight, and it will be simple enough for her to pass on the information. But he also knows that he can do this, now, the work of a few minutes, and he chafes at his inactivity.

_I'll follow you back,_ he tells her and turns on the dying sunlight, leaving behind her protest.

_Orlando, this is no time for your reckless games ..._

He searches, skimming down the hills and out over the dappled grasses at the foot of the Vere, skipping from hollow to hollow where the dimming light pools. He finally touches amber and emerald and topaz, feels a start of surprise and recognition, and he knows he's found Sean. The _athri_ is dust-covered and scruffy, off his mare and helping an older woman tie her bundles more securely on the back of a shaggy pony. Orlando sees shadows under and in his eyes.

_Listen, quickly,_ Orlando says and shows Sean the images in his mind of where the armies lie. 

Sean, with _faradhi_ potential but no Sunrunner training, can't answer, but Orlando feels his gratitude, along with an underlying frustration and impotence that match Orlando's own ... and his worry, worry for his people, worry for Orlando. He watches Sean turn his face toward the setting sun and realizes the light is blood-red, the sky darkening. He knows he'll have to move fast.

He touches Sean one last time before he flees down the twisted, thinning thread of light that leads back to Swalekeep, racing to stay ahead of the dusk. The dim red sunlight is heavy now, dragging at him like quicksand, and aching rotten somehow, like an old tooth. _Hurry, hurry,_ is throbbing through his veins, but it's like moving through the thickness of molasses, and he feels the first sharp pang of fear. He stretches out, reaching for the glimmer of gold on the horizon, and sees shards of color splintering away, diamond and emerald and amethyst slivering into his flesh and cutting down to bone. 

He feels bits of himself unraveling with the light before the dark swallows him.

 

_v. because that's the way it happens_

Orlando wakes from dreams of stars and trees and a longing for something - someone - just beyond his reach.

He's out of bed before he's fully aware, positive he's heard someone calling his name in the hallway, but it's empty, washed smudgy and golden in late-morning sunlight, shimmering with a silver brilliance just under the surface. He shakes his head, trying to lose the overlay like a tracing of stars on a clear night, a night somewhere other than LA - a night where you can see the stars, like those he remembers from New Zealand.

He tries to remember the night before - no, there was no drinking - but he can't quite seem to get his eyes back in focus, and he slumps down the wall, head in his hands. The phone's ringing, and he's tempted to ignore it, but it shrills persistently and he finally trails down the hallway, one hand on the wall to keep himself focused.

"Orlando?" It's Dom's voice on the line, and he sounds worried. "Orlando, are you alright, mate?"

"No," Orlando answers honestly, and he's beginning to wonder if someone dropped something into his perfectly innocent glass of water at the restaurant last night, because he can feel the stone tile in his foyer stretching out to the wooden studs in the walls stretching down through concrete pilings into the earth and this is not exactly what he had in mind when he let Viggo _feng shui_ the place the last time he was over. He thinks if he reached out a hand, the sunlight would drip heavy through his fingers like honey. "No, I'm not. How did you know?"

"I just knew," Dom says on the other end of the line.

"You just knew something was wrong with me, so you decided to ring?" Orlando asks, and he remembers lunch last week, Sean studying him and asking the same question, if he was alright. "What's going on?"

"You're changing, aren't you?" Dom says, and Orlando lifts his free hand, studies the fine grain of the skin on the back, the fingers, the palm.

"How did you know?"

"Because it happened to me," Dom says, and they're both silent for a moment, breathing back and forth.

"What's going on, Monaghan?" Orlando finally asks, again.

"You're becoming an elf."

"Funny, mate. Now cut the Legolas shite and tell me what's going on."

"It's true," Dom says, and his voice is low and gentle in a way that fills Orlando with apprehension.

"There's no such thing as elves."

"There was, and then there wasn't," Dom says. "And now there is again. They disappeared, faded, died out and were killed off. But there was cross-breeding. The old blood is still alive in some of us. And sometimes it ... wakes up."

"I have elven blood," Orlando says. "And it's waking up."

"We're needed," Dom says. "The earth needs us. People need us. We help and we heal."

"You've gone 'round the bend," Orlando says. "You're in some kind of ... of Hollywood cult, aren't you?"

"What have you been dreaming about?" Dom asks, and Orlando responds despite the seeming _non sequitur._

"There's a ... a woman," he says, and he can almost hear Dom's sudden intentness humming over the line like an audible thrum.

"What does she look like?"

"I can't quite see her," Orlando says. "But I think she's wearing blue, blue and silver ..."

_"Elthia,"_ Dom breathes. _"Elthia Calasiuove."_

"Dom, _what's going on?"_

"Stay there," Dom says, "I'm coming over." 

There's a click as he disconnects, and Orlando places the phone carefully back into its cradle. He stands for a moment, thinking - thinking of Dom, of Dom and his trees. Dom's not just buying patches of woodland any longer; he's been planting, here and there, volunteering with some organization. Orlando thinks of Dom's hair getting longer, and he wonders what Dom's ears look like under the bleached-blond strands. He wonders if Dom deliberately picked an acting job that wouldn't last long, for his last gig, and he looks over at a couple of scripts sitting on his own coffee table in the lounge.

He wonders how long he has, if he's even still safe right now, if he'd walk outside to find his old world, his life, his relationships already crumbled away.

He walks over and examines himself in the mirror hanging on the wall. He's changing more every day. His loose curls fall to hide the tips of his pointed ears, and the shift in the planes of his face has been subtle. The most noticeable change - and the least quantifiable - is in his eyes, eyes that seem to reflect a distant light.

Old blood, still alive and waking.

He remembers the reverence in Dom's voice.

_Elthia._

He closes his eyes and sees starlight.


	2. Easter egg bonus scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or, A Sixth Thing That Never Happened to Orlando Bloom

_vi. the king's lettuce_

There's an outraged shriek from the house and the sound of a body battering itself determinedly against a window, trying to get out, someone stamps, and Orlando takes off, out of the garden. He hits the hole in the fence moving fast, and it was a tight squeeze getting in, but he barely notices the rake of splintered wood across his back as he dashes through on the way out, quick and agile past the hedge on the other side of the road, to bound across the field in the silvery pre-dawn light. Dom, who was taunting the cat that's been watching them from inside the house, shoots past him and is waiting at the crest of the next hill, sitting up on an ant heap in the tall grass and sniffing into the morning breeze with a self-satisfied air. Orlando barrels into him, knocking him over, and they scuffle until Billy and Elijah come lolloping up to join them.

"That was fantastic," Elijah says, hopping around in excitement, and Billy cuffs him playfully, rolling him over in the grass. He's back up and running for home with a flash of his tail as soon as he's all the way over, and the others follow him. They crest the hill at full speed and don't stop, powerful hind legs driving them, and Orlando feels himself tipping, tumbling, losing his balance and his equilibrium as he rolls over and over in flashes of blue and green and sky and grass, down to land with legs askew on the patch of flat ground to one side of the burrows, fetching up against Elijah at the bottom. They argue over who managed to roll the farthest this time, Billy preening his whiskers self-importantly before Orlando knocks him down, because he would have rolled farther if Elijah hadn't been in the way.

Orlando sits up and rubs his nose with both front paws, wiping off a dusting of dirt left from his tumble downhill. Sniffing the air, he can catch the scent of green corn from a nearby farm; the morning breeze carries the sounds of a finch in the copse. Sean's sitting under the oak tree that shades some of the rabbit holes, and Orlando leaves the others to their play, hopping over to join him.

"You should come with us next time," he says, shouldering into Sean. "If you can still move that fast."

Sean cuffs him and grabs an ear in his teeth, mock-shaking it, and Orlando rolls over in the grass again.

"I suppose that's fast enough for you," Sean says as they both right themselves, and they hop a few rabbit-lengths to find a patch of grass worth nibbling. "Besides, you missed a cowslip Viggo and I found this morning while you were off playing at being El-ahrairah."

"A cowslip!" Orlando says. "And you didn't save any for me?"

"Oh, so you want lettuce and a cowslip, do you?" Sean asks.

"Rather have lettuce," Orlando says and bounds away as Sean takes another swipe at him. His leap startles a mouse from the tussock it's resting under in some journey of its own, and it squeaks at him disgustedly in the common vernacular shared by animals in the fields. He gets momentarily distracted by some clover, but eventually he makes his way back to the shade under the tree, where he and Sean bite at the greenery in companionable silence as the rest of the morning mist burns off the down.

"We're not likely to get anything any other way," Orlando finally says as sunlight glints amber off Sean's fur. That's the way the warren goes; it's the traditional order of things. They're a bunch of outskirters - a couple of yearlings, a runty buck and a veritable kit, not members of the Owsla, the elite of the warren, with authority and responsibility like Sean.

"You could have the notice of the Chief Rabbit, be a member of the Owsla," Sean tells him.

"And what about Elijah?" Orlando asks. "Or Billy?"

"You think Elijah and Billy can't take care of themselves?" 

Further along the rise of the hill, the other Sean sticks his head out of one of the runs and hops outside, where he sits combing dirt out of his whiskers. His doe will be having her litter soon, and the warren's still small enough that she's digging a new burrow with the help of her mate. Orlando blinks sleepily in the warm sunlight, watching Elijah help them push dirt out of the mouth of the run.

"Look at you, scratcher," his own Sean says, shouldering into him again, not hard enough to tumble him over. "Sleeping out in the open like a _hlessi_ without a burrow."

Later, he wants to say - later, when it starts getting hot after ni-Frith, they'll go down into the coolness of the burrow and sleep away the afternoon's heat. But for now, the morning sun feels too good for Orlando to move. He tucks his nose into Sean's flank and closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of these vignettes were based on genre novels, mainly fantasy with a bit of SF, and they provide a shocking map of my adolescent reading habits. (Or is that a map of my shocking adolescent reading habits?)
> 
> _i. unto zeor, forever_ is based in the Sime~Gen universe, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg; the time frame is envisioned as earlier than the Unity Trilogy - somewhere around _First Channel_ and _Channel's Destiny_.
> 
> _ii. a boy and his horse_ is based on the Valdemar universe by Mercedes Lackey, mainly influenced by the old-school _Arrows_ trilogy.
> 
> _iii. newborn world_ is based on John Varley and his Eight Worlds future history, including _The Ophiuchi Hotline, The Persistance of Vision_ and _Picnic on Nearside,_ although mostly influenced by _Steel Beach_ , which Varley himself called "an alternate universe" of the rest of the books and stories because of its timeline deviations.
> 
> _iv. fire beneath my wings_ is based on Melanie Rawn's _Dragon Prince_ and _Dragon Star_ trilogies.
> 
> _v. because that's the way it happens_ is based on the Strands of Starlight universe by Gael Baudino, primarily influenced by the fourth book, _Strands of Sunlight,_ set in modern-day Denver. (The first three books are historical fantasy.)
> 
> _vi. the king's lettuce_ , the Easter egg bonus, is (of course) based on _Watership Down_ , by Richard Adams - which needs no explanation.


End file.
